William Shakespeare's religion
Knowledge of William Shakespeare's religion is important in understanding the man and his works because of the wealth of biblical and liturgical allusions, both Protestant and Catholic, in his writings and the hidden references to contemporary religious tensions that are claimed to be found in the plays. The topic is the subject of intense scholarly debate. There is no direct evidence of William Shakespeare's religious affiliation; however, over the years there have been many speculations about the personal religious beliefs that he may have held, if any. These speculations are based on circumstantial evidence from historical records and on analysis of his published work. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare's family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic; although there is disagreement over whether he in fact was so, many scholars maintain the former consensus position that he was a member of the established Anglican Church.Doherty Fenty, Kathleen. "The Bard of Rome? Shakespeare and the Catholic Question" America Magazine, September 14, 2009. Retrieved 2011-11-03.Sams, Eric, The Real Shakespeare, pp. 11-13, Yale University Press, 1998 Miola, Robert S., Early modern Catholicism, p. 352, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-925985-2, ISBN 978-0-19-925985-4 Due to the paucity of direct evidence, general agreement on the matter has not yet been reached. As one analysis of the subject puts it, "One cannot quite speak of a consensus among Shakespeare scholars on this point, though the reluctance of some to admit the possibility of Catholicism in Shakespeare's family is becoming harder to maintain."Shell, Alison. "Why Didn't Shakespeare Write Religious Verse?", in Kozuka, Takashi and J. R. Mulryne (eds.), [http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA86&id=l_AwdyNTalYC#v=onepage&q&f=false Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson], p.86, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006. ISBN 0-7546-5442-7, ISBN 978-0-7546-5442-1 Shakespeare's family In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to accept the practices of the Church of England, and recusancy laws made illegal not only the Roman Catholic Mass, but also any service not found in the Book of Common Prayer. In Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed reforms.The Shakespeares and ‘the Old Faith’ (1946) by John Henry de Groot; Die Verborgene Existenz Des William Shakespeare: Dichter Und Rebell Im Katholischen Untergrund (2001) by Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel; Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (2005) by Clare Asquith. Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants. Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery.Quoted in Schoenbaum (1977: 49) "In my conjecture concerning the writer of that paper I certainly was mistaken". Although the tract document itself has been lost, 20th century evidence has linked Malone's reported wording of the tract definitively to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated in England by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English.Holden, Anthony. [http://www.hbgusa.com/books/64/0316518492/chapter_excerpt10046.html William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius] Little, Brown (2000). John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.Mutschmann, H. and Wentersdorf, K., Shakespeare and Catholicism, Sheed and Ward: New York, 1952, p. 401. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. In 1606, his daughter Susanna was listed as one of the residents of Stratford who failed to take Holy Communion at Easter, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.Ackroyd (2005: 451) It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent. Shakespeare's schooling Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers,Ackroyd (2005: 63-64) and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit priest.Hammerschmidt-Hummel, H. "The most important subject that can possibly be": A Reply to E. A. J. Honigmann, Connotations, 2002-3. Retrieved 2011-11-03. Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, travelled to the Catholic seminary at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising, along with Cottam.Ackroyd (2005: 61) The "lost years" (1585–1592) John Aubrey, in 1693, reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster,Schoenbaum (1977: 110–11) a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire,Oakes, Edward T. "Shakespeare’s Millennium" First Things, December 1999. Retrieved 2011-11-03. a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia.Honigmann E. A. J. (1999). Shakespeare: The Lost Years. Revised Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1. ISBN 0-7190-5425-7; Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xvii. Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Peter Ackroyd adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, shows that they were in "probability" in Shakespeare's writing.Ackroyd (2005: 76) Catholic sympathies Possible Catholic wedding The writer's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith in the town of Temple Grafton a few miles from Stratford.Schoenbaum (1977: 87) In 1586 the crown named Frith, who maintained the appearance of Protestantism, as a Catholic priest.William marries Anne Hathaway In Search of Shakespeare, PBS. (MayaVision International 2003) Some surmise Shakespeare wed in Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament. He was thought to have rushed his marriage ceremony, as Anne was three months pregnant. Historical sources The historian John Speed asserted Shakespeare's links with Catholicism in 1611, accusing him of satirizing the perceived Protestant martyr John Oldcastle (first portrayed by Shakespeare under his character's real name, then the alias Falstaff after complaints from his descendants) and linking the playwright with Jesuit Robert Persons, describing them together as "the Papist and his poet". Joseph Pearce, in The Quest for Shakespeare, characterises Speed's "astonishing attack" on Shakespeare as a manifestation of the general suspicion in which the Puritans, of whom Speed was one, held playmakers. He explains that Speed was attacking Persons and Shakespeare for demolishing the notion in Foxe's Book of Martyrs that Oldcastle was a Protestant hero. Speed cited Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1—in early performances of which a knight named Oldcastle played a prominent part—as "falsifying… the history of England", and thus showing that Shakespeare held this view in common with the Jesuits: as Pearce says, "endeavoring to tar Shakespeare with the Jesuit brush".Pearce (2008: 155–156). Lord Cobham, descendant of Oldcastle, forced Shakespeare to rename his character and include a retraction at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. More simply, the facts of the story of Prince Henry and his "dear friend" Oldcastle, whom he left to his fate after failing to persuade the stubborn old knight to recant after the church had him arrested, appears in the contemporary accounts of the period and was the historical basis for Shakespeare's inclusion of the character in his play. Archdeacon Richard Davies, a 17th century Anglican cleric, wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst". The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) states that "Davies, an Anglican clergyman, could have had no conceivable motive for misrepresenting the matter in these private notes and as he lived in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire he may be echoing a local tradition" but concludes that Davies' comment "is by no means incredible, but it would obviously be foolish to build too much upon an unverifiable tradition of this kind".Thurston, Herbert."The Religion of Shakespeare" Catholic Encyclopedia (1912). Accessed 2012-02-17. Pearce maintains that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence is Shakespeare's purchase of Blackfriars Gatehouse, a place that had remained in Catholic hands since the time of the Reformation, was notorious for Jesuit conspiracy, passageways and priest holes to hide priests, and for covert Catholic activity in London.Booknotes, Interview of Joseph Pearce by Doug Keck on EWTNPearce (2008: 158-163; 165; 167))Wilson, Richard, Secret Shakespeare, p. 5, Manchester University Press, 2004 Shakespeare ensured that the tenant John Robinson remained in the house, and its use continued. The same year that Robinson was named as Shakespeare's tenant, Robinson's brother entered the seminary at the English College in Rome. Schoenbaum, however, assigns a purely fiscal motive to the purchase: after examining the complex financial arrangements surrounding the transaction he concludes, "an investment, pure and simple".Schoenbaum (1977: 272) Textual evidence An increasing number of scholars look to evidence from Shakespeare’s work, such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, as suggestive of a Catholic worldview,Oakes, Edward T. "The Age of Shakespeare, Shakespeare The Trial of Man" First Things, June/July, 2004. Retrieved 2011-11-03. but these speculations can be contradictory: the University of Wittenberg was an intellectual centre of the Protestant Reformation and the whole of Hamlet can be read as filled with "cryptic allusions to the Protestant Reformation". Other indications have been detected in the sympathetic view of religious life expressed in the phrase "thrice blessed", scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, sympathetic allusions to English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion that are claimed to exist in Twelfth Night"Allusions to Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night" by C. Richard Desper, Elizabethan Review, Spring/Summer 1995. and many other matters. More recently it has been suggested that Shakespeare was simply playing upon an English Catholic tradition, rather than actually being Catholic, and was utilizing the symbolic nature of Catholic ceremony to embellish his own theatre. Schoenbaum suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family, but considers the writer himself to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives:"...the artist takes precedence over the votary".Schoenbaum (1977: 60–61): Literary scholar David Daniell arrives at a similar conclusion, but from the opposite direction: as a good Protestant Shakespeare used many biblical allusions and quotations in his works, but only because his audience, well versed in the Bible in English, would quickly take his meaning. Daniell cautions that Shakespeare's religious inclinations are not reliably deduced from his use of sources: Shakespeare knew Ovid and Plutarch well, but that didn't make him a Pagan. Literary scholar and Jesuit Father Peter Milward and the writer Clare Asquith are among those who have claimed that Catholic sympathies are detectable in his writing.Milward, Peter. The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays. Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, Sophia University (1997); reprinted Southampton: Saint Austin Press (1997). ISBN 1-901157-10-5.Milward, Peter. Shakespeare the Papist. Ann Arbor, MI: Sapientia Press (2005). ISBN 1-932589-21-X. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', those pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'.Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (2005) by Clare Asquith. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code. Asquith's particular claims, however, have met with some "damning" criticism and, according to professor Jeffrey Knapp, the work of scholars like Peter Milward, who believe that "the deepest inspiration in Shakespeare's plays is both religious and Christian", has had "little influence on recent Shakespeare scholarship". John Waterfield comments that critics who were hostile to Asquith's work "mistakenly supposed a conflict between Asquith's allegorical reading" and the "traditional literal meaning", when it is not really a matter of chosing between two alternatives as Asquith was not offering the sole "true meaning" of the plays.Waterfield, John [http://books.google.com/books?id=xUqluJnAlsAC&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false The Heart of His Mystery: Shakespeare and the Catholic Faith in England Under Elizabeth and James], p.5, iUniverse, 2009 Cambridge specialist in Tudor history John Guy declares that if even half her assertions are right, it makes a difference which is challenging and goes to the root of our understanding of Shakespeare. Revision of older plays Although Shakespeare commonly adapted existing tales, typically myths or works in another language, Joseph Pearce notes that King John, King Lear and Hamlet were all works that had been done recently and in English with an anti-Catholic bias, and that Shakespeare's versions appear to be a refutation of the source plays.Booknotes, Interview of Joseph Pearce by Doug Keck on EWTNPearce (2008: 181-182) Pearce believes otherwise he would not have "reinvented the wheel", revisiting recent English plays. Peter Milward is among those who hold the view that Shakespeare engaged in rebuttal of recent English "anti-Papist" works. On the other hand, Jonathan Bate describes the process of Leir transformation into Lear as replacing the "external trappings of Christianity" with a pagan setting. He adds that the devils plaguing "Poor Tom" in Shakespeare's version have the same names as the evil spirits in a book by Samuel Harsnett, later Archbishop of York, that denounces the "fake" Catholic practice of exorcism.From Harsnett, Samuel (1603). A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, quoted in Bate (2008: 154) Inscriptions at the Venerable English College The names “Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” and “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” are found within ancient inscriptions at the Venerable English College, a seminary in Rome which has long trained Catholic clergy serving in Britain. Scholars have speculated that these names might be related to Shakespeare, who is alleged to have visited the city of Rome twice during his life.Owen, Richard. "Cryptic signatures that ‘prove Shakespeare was a secret Catholic’" The Times, 22 December 2009. (article behind paywall). Protestantism Shakespeare editor and historian A. L. Rowse is firm in his assertion that Shakespeare was not a Catholic: "He was an orthodox, confirming member of the Church into which he had been baptised, was brought up and married, in which his children were reared and in whose arms he at length was buried". He identifies anti-Catholic sentiment in Sonnet 124, taking "the fools of time" in the last lines of this sonnet "To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness who have lived for crime." to refer to the many Jesuits who were executed for treason in the years 1594-5. John Klause of Hofstra University accepts that Shakespeare intended "the fools of time" in the sonnet to represent executed Jesuits, but contends that the poet, by alluding to executed Jesuit Robert Southwell's Epistle of Comfort and its glorification of martyrdom, sympathises with them. Klause maintains that Southwell's influence is also identifiable in Titus Andronicus. Klause (2008: 136) A later assessment places Klause's interpretation as "against most recent trends". Notwithstanding Pearce's identification (above) of Shakespeare's King John as a reworking of The Troublesome Reign of King John, made to refute its anti-Catholic bias, strong examples of Protestant sympathies, such as the denouncement of the Pope as an "unworthy and ridiculous...Italian priest" with "usurped authority", remain in the text.The life and death of King John: Act III, Scene 1 Yale's David Kastan sees no inconsistency in a Protestant dramatist lampooning the martyr Oldcastle in Henry IV (above): a contemporary audience would have identified Shakespeare's unsympathetic portrayal as a proof of his Protestantism because the knight's Lollardry was in the author's time identified with Puritanism, by then abhorred for undermining the established church. Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges the convention that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth is a reference to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who had been executed in 1606.Greenblatt (2004: 388) He argues that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation, and not from any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause — indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Literary editor Bishop Warburton declared that in the mind of Jacobean playgoers the policy of equivocation, adopted as an official doctrine of the Jesuits, would have been a direct reminder of Catholic treason in the "Gunpowder plot". Shakespeare may have also been aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s. Perhaps Shakespeare'sPlaywright John Fletcher may have contributed to the text. most direct reference in the plays to contemporary religious issues comes at the birth of Queen Elizabeth in Henry VIII, during whose reign, as the character Archbishop Cranmer, architect of the reformation, predicts: "God shall be truly known".Henry VIII, Act V, Scene 5 One perspective is that to deduce from the evidence a definite Anglican Shakespeare is to misapprehend the religious circumstances of the time, the word "Anglican" not existing until nearly two decades after the writer's death and contemporary historians not recognizing Anglicanism as a firm organization or religious identity during his lifetime.Rist, Thomas, Shakespeare Now and Then: Communities, Religion, Reception in Writing and religion in England, 1558-1689: studies in community-making and cultural memory, pp. 125-126, Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson eds., Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009 In a similar vein, Maurice Hunt, Jean-Christophe Mayer and others have written of a Shakespeare with a syncretic or hybrid faith, in some sense both Catholic and Protestant.Klause, John, [http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA260&id=gLWz6b3EbHIC&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit], p.260 fn.5, Associated University Presse, 2008 Atheism The fact of Shakespeare’s Christianity is in itself not universally accepted. William Birch of Oxford University was, in 1848, probably the first to air the notion of atheism, based solely on his interpretation of sentiments expressed in the works, but the theory was dismissed as a "rare tissue of perverted ingenuity" by a contemporary, the textual editor H. H. Furness. Furness, H.H. (ed.) [http://books.google.com/books?id=-31BAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA135#v=onepage&q&f=false A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: King Lear]. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. (1880), p.135, n. lines 156–169. OCLC 249150403 The 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only Shakespeare's Catholicism, but whether "he was not infected with the atheism, which...was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Some evidence in support of Shakespeare's supposed atheism, and then only in the form of "evidence of absence", exists in the discovery by John Payne Collier, a notorious forger of historical documents, who examined the records of St Saviour's, Southwark, and found that Shakespeare, alone among his fellow Globe actors, was not shown as a churchgoer. According to Joseph Pearce, the obvious conclusion is recusancy, but modern scholars sometimes cite this as evidence of atheism.Pearce (2008: 126) "Such a conclusion misses the obvious and logical point…that Shakespeare remained…a believing Catholic" See also *The Quest for Shakespeare, television series from Eternal World Television Network, about the evidence of Shakespeare's Catholicism. References * religion, Shakespeare's Shakespeare, William